Eduardo Zorita

Our climate and environment are currently subject to strong anthropogenic pressures but also exhibit pervasive natural variations, as they did in the past and will continue to do so in the future. The study of past climate and environmental variability serves several objectives: one is to estimate the amplitude of those variations, which is a necessary step to inform policy makers not only with an average future trend but also with a corridor of future environmental paths; a second objective is to learn about the mechanisms behind those natural variations, including extreme events, since those mechanism will likely be relevant for the future decades; a third objective is to place the currently observed trends against the backdrop of natural variability.

Coastal regions are the transition between open oceans and land masses. They feel the influence of both climate subsystems. A large proportion of human population lives at the coast and uses the ecosystem services provided by the coast. Therefore, the study of past climate and environmental variations in these regions requires the analysis of both marine and terrestrial environmental archives - e.g.tree-rings and molluscs- together with climate simulations with comprehensive models at global and regional scales.
I am interested in the Holocene, the current warm period over the last 10,000 years that followed the last Ice Age, and particularly the past two thousand years. This period contains several warmer and colder phases, being still similar the our current climate. Therefore, the lessons learned from the analysis of this period are more easily transferable to the present climate and the climate of the next decades.

Influence of large-scale climate variability on upwelling regimes off the Namibian coast:implications for past and future climates. Sub-project in GENUS-II Geochemistry and Ecology of the Namibian Upwelling System), funded by BMBF, start May 2012

Climate signals in coastal deposits. Subproject in REKLIM. Funded by the Helmholz Society, Start January 2012.

Precipitation in the past millennia in Europe -Extension back to Roman times(PRIME-II, funded by the German Science Foundation, start end 2011).

The future climate of the Hamburg region under the assumption of a global temperature increase of two Kelvin (Hamburg 2K, funded by the DFG within the cluster of excellence CLISAP "Integrated Climate System Analysis and Prediction")

Precipitation in the past millennium in Europe (PRIME,funded by the German Science Foundation, start September 2009).

Advanced modeling tool for scenarios of the Baltic Sea ECOsystem to SUPPORT decision making (ECOSUPPORT, funded by the EU-BMBF, s
tart January 2009).

Plussee long-term data acquisition and analysis (PLUSDATA, funded by the DFG within the cluster of excellence
CLISAP "Integrated Climate System Analysis and Prediction").

1994-1995. Laboratoire d'Oceanographie Dynamique et de Climatologie, Paris: Climatological observations seem to indicate that at middle and high latitudes there exist climate oscillations with periods of several decades. The origin of these oscillations may lie in the internal dynamics of the climate system, especially in the coupled interaction between the atmosphere and the ocean. However, the available observations do not allow for a clear identification of the physical mechanism that may give rise to those oscillations. The analysis of long-integrations of coupled atmosphere-ocean models may give clues about the real mechanism that are operating in nature. Since the amount of data generated in this integration is enormous, sophisticated statistical techniques to identify oscillations such data sets have been used, such as Singular Spectrum Analysis and Principal Oscillation Patterns.

1989-1993, Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie, Hamburg: Possible climate change is currently estimated with numerical models that simulate the present and the future earth climate. Their skilful resolution is nowadays of the order 2000 Km and therefore they cannot properly the local and regional features that are important to study the impact of climate change on the environment. One way to overcome this scale mismatch is statistical downscaling techniques: A statistical transfer function is estimated by analysing observations of the large-scale circulation and the regional climate. This transfer function can be used to translate the changes of the atmospheric circulation simulated by a climate model to changes of the regional climate. The transfer functions may be designed by means of multivariate linear techniques, such as canonical correlation, or by nonlinear techniques, such as analogue methods, classification methods or neural networks.

1984-1988, University of Zaragoza, Spain. Ph.D. Thesis: Ionic crystals are normally transparent to visible light. However the presence of metallic impurities or lattice point defects may change the optical properties of these crystals by inducing absortion and emission bands in the visible and infra-red spectrum. These crystals may then be used, for instance, as active laser materials. Since the optical and magnetic properties of these impurities and point defects are very sensitive to their microscopic environment, these properties can also provide valuable information of their local crystalline structure and about structural phase transitions in the host lattice. With magnetic resonance techniques it is possible to estimate with high accuracy the bonding angles of the impurity and its neighbouring ions. Sometimes the distances between them can also be estimated, thus providing a full three-dimensional picture of the distorted lattice surrounding the impurity.

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About me

I have been working at the HZG - formerly the GKSS Research Centre- since 1996, where presently I am a senior scientist at its Institute of Coastal Research. My activities are also part of the research cluster CLISAP. My reseach areas are currently:

Analysis and simulation of the climate of the past millennia.

Climate and Sea-level variations in the Baltic Sea in the recent past and in the future.